Hinge & Sign

Starred review from May 9, 1994
McHugh ( Broken English ) is a cerebral writer whose thinking maintains a dialectical tension with her choice of words and forms--they challenge one another. How generic a description that sounds; and yet, McHugh is anything but generic. The words and forms? They tend to be jauntily fastidious, calling to mind something of the steeliness (and the corners cut, in fun and in earnestness) of Emily Dickinson, while also summoning up a sure sense of jazz. The poetry seems to be a zealously crafted improvisation. And while her very gift for crafting can occasionally crimp or overtake play of mind, most of McHugh's poems are large in manner and in matter, forward-thrusting songs, whether they concern the infinitive ``to have to''; a protracted death that is ``unspeakable'' (but marvelously spoken of); or McHugh's coiled, frontal version of an ars poetica . It's good, now, to have more of her: here, 24 new poems, along with generous selections from five previous books. ``The edges of the said / so long and so / perversely have/attracted me,'' she writes; her work is a testing ground of edges, allegiances and resistances.

May 15, 1994
In her first collection since "Shades" (1988), McHugh brings poems from four previous volumes together with a significant amount of new work. In a brief introduction, she writes that to be a writer with a reader "is rather like being, oneself, of two minds, at every turn: hinge and sign." Not only are there hinges of lyrical words keeping together the signs in her poems; they also contain a woman with one glass eye, a waddling seal, Fido the uberpooch, and a martyr in an iron mask. McHugh artfully entwines the prosaic with the empyrean, twisting mundane images into verbal feasts, letting language flow through her hands rather than shaping it to her will. Often she makes wry, witty observations as though she were a kind of contemporary Greek chorus chiming in from the stage's dark recesses. This collection allows one to appreciate the development of her poetry over 25 years and to witness the increasing strength and maturity of her voice. ((Reviewed May 15, 1994))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1994, American Library Association.)